Roger Casement

Roger Casement (1 September 1864-3 August 1916) was a British Foreign Office diplomat and Irish nationalist who sought German assistance in the failed 1916 Easter Rising. Casement's knighthood and other honors were stripped, and he was executed for treason.

Biography
Roger Casement was born in Sandy Cove, County Dublin, Ireland on 1 September 1864, and he was educated at Ballymena Academy in County Antrim. Casement was born into an Anglican Anglo-Irish family, but he later converted to Catholicism. Casement went to Africa in 1884 and joined the colonial service there in 1892; his reports on the inhuman treatment of native workers in the Belgian Congo in 1904 and in the rubber plantations of Peru in 1912 earned him an international reputation as a humanitarian. He was knighted for his work in 1911, but he was forced to retire from foreign service due to the adverse effects of the tropics on his health. He became active in the Gaelic League and other Irish nationalist movements, joining the Irish Volunteers in 1913. During World War I, he went to Berlin in October 1914 with the goal of enlisting Irish prisoners of war in an Irish rising against Britain. He failed to form a brigade, but eventually persuaded the Germans to send 20,000 guns to County Kerry on the ship Aud in April 1916, intending to support the planned Easter Rising. Casement worried that eh supply was inadequate, and he followed in a U-boat and landed at Banna Strand, Tralee, County Kerry on 20 April 1916. He tried to get a message to Dublin to halt the risng, but he was captured and taken to London for interrogation. While he was there, the Easter Rising broke out in Dublin, and he was charged with high treason, convicted, and sentenced to death. A large campaign was mounted to have the sentence revoked, but copies of his diaries (which contained homosexual references and passages) were circulated to discredit him. This worked, the campaign failed, and he was hung at Pentonville jail. His remnants were returned to Ireland in 1965 and h ewas reinterred in Glasnevin Cemetery on 1 March after a state funeral.